It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things.

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.

On the principle laid down by Gilbert and Sullivan that when everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody; if everybody is abnormal, we don't need to worry about anybody.

The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.